Senate OKs Pruitt for EPA, first Cubans deported after “wet foot, dry foot” ending, and more from the United States and around the world.

—Senate confirmed Scott Pruitt to be the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Pruitt, a climate-change skeptic sued the agency while Oklahoma’s attorney general. More here

—Two Cuban women seeking asylum in the U.S. were sent back to Havana by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, marking the first deportations since the U.S. reversed its “wet foot, dry foot” policy. More here

—Spain’s Princess Cristina has been cleared of all charges in a trial involving tax fraud. Her husband, Inaki Urdangarin, was handed a 75-month sentence. More here

—We’re tracking the news stories of the day below. All updates are in Eastern Standard Time (GMT -5).

U.S. Deports First Cubans Since 'Wet Foot, Dry Foot' Repeal

Two Cuban women seeking asylum in the U.S. were sent back to Havana by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials Friday, marking the first deportations since the U.S. reversed its “wet foot, dry foot” policy. The policy, which granted residency to Cubans who made it to U.S. soil, was terminated by President Obama through an executive order in January as part of the administration’s efforts to normalize relations with Cuba after the restoration of diplomatic ties in 2015. As the Miami Herald reports, the two Cuban nationals were traveling with European passports and requested asylum upon their arrival at Miami International Airport, though it is unclear when exactly they arrived. Wilfredo Allen, an attorney for one of the women, said the two women requested that their asylum application be suspended following their detention so that they could return to Cuba voluntarily—a request Allen said was denied.

Senate Confirms Pruitt as EPA Chief

The U.S. Senate voted to approve Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency despite strong opposition from Democrats. Pruitt, who previously served as attorney general of Oklahoma, is a skeptical of climate change. The 52-46 vote was largely along party lines. Two Democratic senators—Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Manchin of West Virginia—joined their Republican colleagues in conforming Pruitt to the job. One GOP senator, Susan Collins of Maine, voted against him. More here

Texas Wants People to Know the Chilean Flag Emoji Is Not an Acceptable Replacement for the Lone Star Flag

AP

A member of the Texas House of Representatives wants citizens to know the Chilean flag emoji is not a suitable substitute for the Lone Star Flag. Representative Tom Oliverson, of Cypress, introduced the bill Thursday, and while it doesn’t outlaw the Chilean flag emoji, it’s meant as a strong reminder that there is a difference. The two flags are indeed similar, except that the blue stripe on the Texas state flag runs all the way down the left side, whereas on the Chilean flag it’s contained to a square in the top left corner. But because there are no state-flag emojis, the Chilean flag has been widely used as a passable substitute. To help raise awareness of the difference, however, Oliverson is trying to start a viral hashtag: #TheBlueGoesAllTheWayDown. In the bill, Oliverson wrote that “the colors of the Chilean flag depict sky, snow, and blood spilled while fighting for freedom, but the blue, white, and red of the Lone Star Flag stand for the Texan values of loyalty, purity, and bravery.” As the Dallas Morning News pointed out, the Chilean likeness has caused confusion even among state agencies, as in 2011 when Atascosa County officials used the wrong flag emoji accompanying a tweet.

Spanish Princess Cleared in Tax-Fraud Case, but Her Husband Is Sentenced

(Reuters)

Spain's Princess Cristina, sister of King Felipe VI, was cleared Friday of tax-fraud charges in a case that stemmed from what prosecutors said were her links to her husband’s business affairs between 2007 and 2008. Her husband, Inaki Urdangarin, a former Olympic handball player, was handed a 75-month sentence for the charges by the court in Majorca. The couple had been investigated since 2010. As NPR reported at the time: “At issue is around $8 million in public funds that went missing from the sports nonprofit Noos Institute, which Urdangarin chaired. Prosecutors allege Urdangarin embezzled the money through shell companies, at least one of which, Aizoon, was partially owned by Cristina. The charges against the princess stem from $2.6 million of the funds.” The couple had denied wrongdoing. Cristina was the first Spanish royal in modern times to face prosecution. The verdict can be appealed.

Trump to Visit Boeing Plant in South Carolina

President Trump visits North Charleston, South Carolina, today to meet with executives and workers from Boeing at an event during which the aircraft-maker is expected to unveil the 787-10 Dreamliner. His visit comes two days after workers at the plant rejected a union. It also comes a day after a news conference in Washington that Trump used to berate the media and rail against intelligence leaks about his administration. The president heads to Florida for the weekend where he will hold a rally in Melbourne that my colleague David Graham likened to Trump kicking off his 2020 re-election campaign.

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Despite the easing of taboos and the rise of hookup apps, Americans are in the midst of a sex recession.

These should be boom times for sex.

The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.

If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal.

Donald Trump likes to pit elite and non-elite white people against each other. Why do white liberals play into his trap?

“I want them to talk about racism every day,” Steve Bannon, President Donald Trump’s former strategist, told The American Prospectlast year. “If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats.”

Bannon was tapping into an old American tradition. As early as the 1680s, powerful white people were serving up racism to assuage the injuries of class, elevating the status of white indentured servants over that of enslaved black people. Some two centuries later, W. E. B. Du Bois observed that poor white people were compensated partly by a “public and psychological wage”—the “wages of whiteness,” as the historian David Roediger memorably put it. These wages pit people of different races against one another, averting a coalition based on shared economic interests.

Another big project has found that only half of studies can be repeated. And this time, the usual explanations fall flat.

Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and TED Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the marshmallow test, where our ability to resist gratification in early childhood predicts our achievements in later life. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

At an inaugural desert festival of yogis and spirit guides like Russell Brand, an exclusive industry grapples with consumerism, addiction, and the actual meaning of wellness.

I first felt reality shift when, at 7 a.m. on a Saturday, there was a line for a class called Body Blast Bootcamp, and I worried that there wouldn’t be enough room for everyone.

The draw to this explicitly not-fun undertaking, others in line told me, was that we would be glad to have done it when it was over. We all made it in, and the workout studio was a carpeted conference room where an Instagram-famous instructor with a microphone headset was waiting to give us high fives. “The hardest step is showing up!”

Once we started working out, a person walked around apparently taking Instagram videos, and people were not bothered by this. Another brought a mini tripod to get some shots of herself in action. There was shouting and a Coldplay house remix. Someone offered me a box of alkaline water, and I drank it because no neutral water was available.

“Rich people don’t get their own ‘better’ firefighters, or at least they aren’t supposed to.”

As multiple devastating wildfires raged across California, a private firefighting crew reportedly helped save Kanye West and Kim Kardashian’s home in Calabasas, TMZ reported this week. The successful defense of the $50 million mansion is the most prominent example of a trend that’s begun to receive national attention: for-hire firefighters protecting homes, usually on the payroll of an insurance company with a lot at risk.

The insurance companies AIG and Chubb have publicly talked about their private wildfire teams. AIG has its own “Wildfire Protection Unit,” while Chubb—and up to a dozen other insurers—contract with Wildfire Defense Systems, a Montana company that claims to have made 550 “wildfire responses on behalf of insurers,” including 255 in just the past two years. Right now in California, the company has 53 engines working to protect close to 1,000 homes.

Their huge mounds cover an area the size of Britain, and are visible from space.

In the east of Brazil, mysterious cones of earth rise from the dry, hard-baked soil. Each of these mounds is about 30 feet wide at its base, and stands six to 13 feet tall. From the ground, with about 60 feet of overgrown land separating each mound from its neighbors, it’s hard to tell how many there are. But their true extent becomes dramatically clear from space.

Using satellite images, Roy Funch from the State University of Feira de Santana has estimated that there are about 200 million of these mounds. They’re arrayed in an uncannily regular honeycomb-like pattern. Together, they cover an area roughly the size of Great Britain or Oregon, and they occupy as much space as the Great Pyramid of Giza 4,000 times over. And this colossal feat of engineering is, according to Funch, the work of the tiniest of engineers—a species of termite called Syntermes dirus, whose workers are barely half an inch long.

The civil-liberties organization has taken a stand against stronger due-process protections in campus tribunals that undermines its own principles.

Last week, the NRA kept defending gun rights, the AARP kept advocating for older Americans, and the California Avocado Commission was as steadfast as ever in touting “nature’s highest achievement.” By contrast, the ACLU issued a public statement that constituted a stark, shortsighted betrayal of the organization’s historic mission: It vehemently opposed stronger due-process rights for the accused.

The matter began when Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos put forth new guidelines on how to comply with Title IX, the law that forbids colleges that receive federal funding to exclude any students, deny them benefits, or subject them to any discrimination on the basis of sex.

The most controversial changes concern what happens when a student stands accused of sexual misbehavior. “Under the new rules, schools would be required to hold live hearings and would no longer rely on a so-called single investigator model,” TheNew York Timesreports. “Accusers and students accused of sexual assault must be allowed to cross-examine each other through an adviser or lawyer. The rules require that the live hearings be conducted by a neutral decision maker and conducted with a presumption of innocence. Both parties would have equal access to all the evidence that school investigators use to determine facts of the case, and a chance to appeal decisions.” What’s more, colleges will now have the option to choose a somewhat higher evidentiary standard, requiring “clear and convincing evidence” rather than “a preponderance of the evidence” in order to establish someone’s guilt.

Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.

In the early 1980s, the world of school book fairs was “a highly competitive and very secretive industry,” according to a New York Timesarticleat the time. The fairs numbered in the thousands and spanned the United States. They were put on by a mix of organizers: A few national corporations, about 25 to 30 regional companies, and assorted bookstores.

By the 1990s, one organizer reigned: the Scholastic Corporation. Scholastic, founded in 1920 to publish books and magazines aimed at young readers, had purchased several of its smaller competitors. The company became the largest operator of children’s book fairs in the country, a title it still holds today.

But we’re not here to talk about Scholastic’s business history, and I think you know that. If you’re a young adult who attended elementary school in the United States, I’d guess that when you saw the headline on this story, something deep inside your mind cracked open. With an unmistakable pang of nostalgia,the memory of a Scholastic book fair, with all its concomitant joys, came flooding in.

At an international conference, allies grieved the loss of the United States they had believed in.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET on November 19, 2018

The Halifax Security Forum is designed to be a gathering of the world’s democratic countries, which are allied to protect each other. Hosted by the Canadian defense minister, the Forum’s signature is the brief videos that introduce the annual gathering. This year’s intro showed relay runners, mostly American, at the Olympics from Berlin in 1936 forward, ending in an uncertain baton handoff—a powerful metaphor for the free world’s worries about American leadership in the age of Trump.*

The Halifax Forum, occurring just after President Donald Trump unleashed yet another petulant tirade against Germany and France that culminated in the unseemly taunt that Parisians were speaking German until the U.S. intervened in World Wars I and II, had a funereal feel this year. Allies are grieving the loss of an America they believed in, as it sinks in that they cannot rely on us any longer.

Journalists have become complicit in spreading the president’s falsehoods and conspiracy theories. Here’s how they can do better.

The news media today face an epistemic crisis: how to publish the president’s commentary without amplifying his fabrications and conspiracy theories.

One flashpoint came several weeks ago, when President Donald Trump told Axios reporters that he planned to use an executive order to end birthright citizenship because, as he put it, “we’re the only country in the world where a person comes in and has a baby, and the baby is essentially a citizen.” On Twitter, Axios CEO and co-founder Jim VandeHei wrote, “Exclusive: Trump to terminate birthright citizenship.”

As many journalists quickly pointed out, this was multilayered malarkey. The president was proposing an unconstitutional means of obliterating the Fourteenth Amendment on the basis of a falsehood; more than two dozen countries in the Western Hemisphere have unrestricted jus soli laws, like the U.S. Axios was treating as fact a haphazard plan, in search of an impossible outcome, justified by a false assertion.